I have taken a Curry Club menu from Wetherspoons and reproduced it using the process of screen printing. My idea sits somewhere between duchamp's ready made and Warhol's re-appropriation of consumer images and products. I neither wish to create a ready made, by simply taking a used curry club menu and placing it in an art environment, nor do I wish to mass produce it with the suggestion of it's purpose as an art object. It is more a documentation from the life of a modern day flaneur. I have screen printed the menu, turning it into an art object by way of process, but instead of then leaving it in art context, I have returned it to it's home, eating on it, extending it's life beyond a screen print. Then for a final time returning it back to art and framing the used paper. The work is both a homage to and a comment on low British culture which I indulge in fairly regularly. I intend to show this work with other food/consumer related works, amplifying the grotesque values of such practices of life.
This work could have stopped at various points and also carried on further but I feel I arrived at the end with the above process. I left one of the screen printed menus in the Wimbledon Wetherspoons which was even unnoticed by a member of staff who repositioned it ready for a customer, as if it was the real thing. I didn't wait around to see if it got used but the chances were high, giving it another direction, a life lived by instruction and word of mouth, in the style of fluxus, as it would inevitably be destroyed and lost forever.
There is irony in the act of taking something that is already mass produced and turning it into an art object, but then a further irony in returning the art object to the place from where it was copied. I see this as a reverse warhol, it is half his idea but then opposing the mass production idea.
